Land at Liliendaal that was previously earmarked for a hotel is under consideration as the site for the new Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) head office.
The site being considered is on the Railway Embankment and had previously been allocated to the Sun and Sand Group, which defaulted on its commitments. The land has since been returned to the State.
“It is one of the sites that is actively being considered for the new GRA headquarters,” GRA Chairman Rawle Lucas told Stabroek News when contacted on the matter.
The area under consideration is near to the Arthur Chung Convention Centre.
“What the board has done, is discuss the requirements for the new GRA office, and it has by virtue of examining the lands that you just mentioned, that we are pursuing all the legal and administrative requirements, through the various agencies of the government of Guyana, to acquire the land which we would eventually construct the new GRA head office on,” he said.
Last year, the GRA received expressions of interest for the designing of a new headquarters at Liliendaal but the location was not identified.
The designs were submitted just short of three years after the GRA moved into its Camp Street premises in a much-criticised deal. It saw the tax agency paying a monthly rent of around $5M to the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) after the then PPP/C government spent $227M to retrofit the building for the revenue agency. The arrangement had been seen as a way of helping the NIS to recover from bad investment deals. The building was previously owned by CLICO (Guyana) Inc., which had a large sum outstanding to the NIS when it collapsed.
During his August, 2015 Budget presentation, Finance Minister Winston Jordan had lamented the poor state of the current headquarters, saying it was not fit for occupation.
It is now clear that the building is unsuitable for the GRA on many grounds and a huge sum will now have to be expended to house the Authority at the Liliendaal location. The Camp St building has been leaking and during an earth tremor last year it started to shake, sparking panic among workers. The facility also has no parking space and this has led to massive traffic congestion on Camp Street. Another ill-fated decision had seen the GRA permit Chinese logging firm Baishanlin to build a parking lot for it along Lamaha Street, which would have seen customers and employees parking and walking to the Headquarters. The parking lot is now a white elephant.
The GRA Chairman said that the agency was keen on constructing a new building as it does not want a replication of the Camp Street building
“We are not in the business of trying to repeat the same mistake, being going into a building that was constructed by somebody else for their purposes and not ours. It is not something we have thought about because we don’t want to be trapped in the same mistake again,” Lucas said.
